Blackbird House

Rating:
Summary: Melancholy Magic
Review: In a rare and beautiful departure, Hoffman follows her celebrated novel, Probable Future, with 12 lush and evocative stories that trace the lives of various inhabitants of a small Cape Cod farmhouse over the course of generations.
Built during Revolutionary times by a man who tragically dies on his final fishing trip during a British emabargo, Blackbird House is as magical and extraordinary as the characters we meet.
Lysander Wynn, who lost his leg to a giant halibut, finds courage and love with a witch in red boots. Violet Cross, a brilliant girl who loves books and the Harvard scholar who betrayed her, finds love with a local boy. Fourteen-year-old Jamie Farrell becomes a different person when he delivers hot tomato soup to his neighbor on a wintry day. Maya Cooper, the angry daughter of hippies, doesn't understand the love between her parents until it's almost too late.
From colonial times to modern day, Hoffman describes the lives and loves of the farm's inhabitants in lyrical yet melancholic prose that pulls us deep into their history, into the very rooms that shelter secrets and inspire beauty. There are lessons of the heart to be learned inside Blackbird House.

Rating:
Summary: Can you fall in love with a story?
Review: Because I think I have.

If you're looking for a book with a well-defined plot and clear-cut characters, this isn't it.

BLACKBIRD HOUSE has no sharp edges. Rather, it's about blurred boundaries between water and land, organs and skin, love and hate, life and death, conscious and subconscious. The inner and the outer. Seeming contradictions that come to make perfect sense.

It's about different ways people can be lost (`at sea'), find home (even if they've been there all along), shape their lives or let circumstance take over, love, die, be wounded, heal.

Alice Hoffman skillfully maneuvers a thin line, finding a balance between the limited part of existence about which our senses inform us, and what lies beyond ordinary senses. She's created a place where everything has meaning, though that's not necessarily a comforting thing; it's simply what is.

Although it has what may seem to be fantastical touches, BH is not a fantasy, nor is it a New Age-y, feel-good read. It's about aspects of reality some shrug off as imagination, a trick of light or last night's bad clams.

If you give BLACKBIRD HOUSE half a chance, you'll find its truth and beauty -- the type of truth and beauty that are as likely to prick as they are to placate.

Threads of metaphor abound: red and red-related colors, black, fish, birds, snow, cold, feet, cows, milk. And of course the blackbird (which isn't, really).

Rating:
Summary: An unforgettable exploration of the facets of human emotion
Review: Every tale in this wonderful collection of short stories by author Alice Hoffman have one thing in common: they all take place in the fictitious Blackbird House on Cape Cod. Set in the historically rich fabric of New England, each story revolves around something magical and yet heart-wrenchingly real. The stories span from the Revolutionary War to modern day, and explore the timeless themes of love, betrayal, devastation, exhilaration, death and life.

Hoffman has a wonderful way of creating captivating stories that come alive with her luminous prose. She reinvents the fairy tale and never fails to create remarkable stories that stay in the reader's heart long after her books have been put down.

BLACKBIRD HOUSE opens with the story of a mother who loses her son and her husband to the angry sea. All she is left with is the house her husband built and the constant cries of a blackbird that was raised by her son. The stories that fill this collection are short, but their themes ring loudly. Hoffman writes about common feelings in a magical and almost ethereal way. Her descriptions for everything from turnips and water to fears and destiny are lyrical and haunting.

Hoffman writes about young lovers, witches, women with heartache, men who navigate the sea, and children who misbehave. She explores every facet of human emotion, both tender and harsh. Many of her stories are symbolically portrayed, while others are just so beautifully written and insightful that they read like poetry. If you have never explored the world through Alice Hoffman's writing, BLACKBIRD HOUSE is an excellent place to start. It gives the reader a wonderful example of just how prolific and talented a writer Alice Hoffman is and how powerfully her writing resonates with her readers. BLACKBIRD HOUSE is a stunning achievement and an unforgettable book.

--- Reviewed by Jocelyn M. Kelley

Rating:
Summary: Keeping it simple
Review: I am more of a movie buff, but have recently been spending alot more time reading. I couldn't have found a better book to keep me wanting more.
My favorite concept of The Blackbird House was all the short stories and how each one of them intersected. My only regret was not reading it with a book club. I passed it along to my sister and she can't read it fast enough for me. It was just long enough that I may have to read it again to find details that I missed. This was my first book of Alice Hoffman's and I will surely be reading more.

Rating:
Summary: Unique and haunting, this book takes its own road.
Review: I find Alice Hoffman to be completely unique because her world is a multi-layered, intertwined place where the fish in the pond, the birds and stars in the sky, the leaves on the trees and the people that inhabit the spaces between them make up a landscape that I cannot compare to anything else I have read. This book takes her sensibility and uses it in a new way.

Writing teachers always try to get you to tie up loose ends which I think is not always real. In this book, Alice Hoffman ties up some loose ends and leaves others hanging in an extremely intriguing way. I like this quality because it is more true to life. The book tells the stories of the many who have lived in one house over a period of close to 200 years. Some of the characters of Blackbird House intersect and conclude. Others, as in real life, are left open ended. Each character is original and intriguing. The writing is evocative, rich and unique to the gifts of one of the few modern writers that has carved out a place where no one else has gone. Blackbird House is a quick, satisfying, rich read. Don't miss it.

Rating:
Summary: Great Book
Review: I have never read one of her books before. After reading this one I'm gonna read some of her others. I loved the book, the only thing I would have maybe done different would have been the ending. I really enjoyed her writing style and her creativity.

Rating:
Summary: not her best work
Review: I usually am a huge fan of Alice Hoffman. Her writing is beautiful and I love the way she makes the most seemingly mundane things magical. However, this book left me very disappointed. The disjointed story lines left all but a few characters destinies uncertain. Why invest yourself in a story if you don't find out what happens? The fact that all these characters lived in or near blackbird house seems like a charming idea, but the followthrough isn't very satisfying. I wish she had instead chosen a few characters at a specific time and delved deeply into their lives. If you are unfamiliar with Alice Hoffman's work don't start off with this mediocre work, try Here On Earth or Practical Magic.

Rating:
Summary: I love this book.....
Review: Now, I might be a bit prejudiced because I live with 15 parrots and am a wild-bird watcher, but I find this book wonderful. Reading Alice Hoffman's writing is like gazing through a sun-catcher. As the light moves through the colors, it catches your eye and touches your heart in unexpected ways. Ever since her book PRACTICAL MAGIC, Hoffman has lead this reader into a mystical and magical realm where all things are possible, and although truly sad things happen a heartlift is felt at the end if the tale. Hoffman has a deft touch, neither clobbering the reader with too much explanation, nor failing to inform. What happens to the bird? He isn't always black. Do the lovers get together, why yes, you discover a few pages later when their grandchildren tell their story.

Each of the stories in this little book stands alone, yet all are woven into a fabric which includes the threads of singular lives who within the space of a few pages you come to care about. I have read whole novels and not cared for the protagonist or any of the other characters. How can an author be called anything but magical when she can make you care for many people individually wihtin a few paragraphs?

Rating:
Summary: Visit Again & Again
Review: These intertwined storied beg rereading. There's an elusive depth to many of them, and the aforementioned literary imaging is presented masterfully. This collection is written in differing prose; the earlier years of the house being presented in the formal, careful style of the past and the stories of the more contemporary age reflecting the language of that particular historical time. You'll be introduced to some truly arresting characters, many which will stick with you long after you finish the book. There's much creativity and magic to Hoffman's writing, and she readily suspends disbelief. The perfect book for an enjoyable, rewarding weekend's read.

Rating:
Summary: (3.5) Place as a keeper of secrets
Review: This is the kind of novel only Hoffman can write, full of mystery and the indelible images of people who spend their short time on earth stepping quietly into the pages of the past, as the years speed forward to embrace the future.

The epicenter of each family who lives there, Blackbird House knows each memory, the good and the bad, etched into time as it hovers at the edge of the earth at the Cape, only a mile from the ocean, in a fertile field of trees, wild berries and wildly growing vegetation. From the first family residing there and their travails, Hoffman never shrinks from the realities of life and death. Rather, the house serves as an impassive witness to the fortunes and misfortunes of a succession of families. In such a harsh part of the world, where many men make their living from the sea, families endure their losses, accepting fate or despairing at life's cruelties.

Blackbird House seems to draw an inordinate amount of unhappiness, many lonely, desperate people; yet, in its quiet solitude, the house is an anchor, overflowing with wild growth as if nature would make up in abundance what people have lost. Certainly, there are omens, such as the return of the blackbird pet of a young boy lost at sea, the bird's once black feathers turned white. But omens are, after all, in the perception of the beholder.

Hoffman is an artist, a writer who cannot exist in a land without ambiguity. Her message is one of healing, no matter the damage and compassion for a world that often seems careless of human feelings. Blackbird House is a place of opposites, hope and despair, sadness and happiness and death and renewal. Years of disappointment witness the passage of time, ushering in a new day with the promise of tomorrow. Luan Gaines/2004.